iPad is a limited device. But the limits are artificial. The ones set by Apple engineers and Steve Jobs. The ones broken by iOS developers.
On 7 June 2009, iCab 4.6, using the WebKit rendering engine, became the first desktop browser released to display a score of 100/100 and pass the Acid3 test. Apple's Safari 4 browser was released one day later and has been officially credited as being the first official release browser to pass the Acid3 test with a score of 100/100. ICab is a new Macintosh browser from Germany that introduces some interesting features to help users navigate the structure of a website. It is nice to see some competition to Internet Explorer: the Europeans have not given up innovating in Internet software, as also indicated by the Norwegian Opera browser for Windows.
Yes, there are a lot of things you can’t do on the iPad. You can’t access the file system or make one app talk to another directly. No sharing between apps. No side by side multitasking either. But for every single thing that the iPad can’t do, there are multiple things it can, rather magnificently.
Today, I’ll tell you about one such app called iCab ($1.99, Universal). It is a browser that lets you do everything that Safari says is a no-no. Multi-touch gestures,keyboard shortcuts, multi-user login and most importantly – integration of services from different apps.
iPad has a big, beautiful retina screen. One that responds amazingly to touch and is advanced enough to make out the differences between 4-finger tap and a 4-finger swipe. Not putting it to good use is a shame.
From Settings -> User Interface -> Multitouch Gestures you can assign multiple 1 to 4-finger tap and swipe gestures, totaling to about 17 combinations.
What all can you do with it? Lots. Not only are generic functions like next tab, previous tab, fullscreen, etc included, but you can also pull directly from 50 or so included modules. What are modules? We’ll talk about them in detail below but right now just think of them as bookmarklets or extensions. So, with one multi-finger gesture, you can send the page you are currently reading directly to Pocket. Neat, eh?
Yes, drawing gestures on screens are nothing new. In fact, I remember using them on my Java based phone that had a resistive touchscreen. I had to use (gasp) a stylus!
But thankfully, drawing experience on the iPad using my fingers is nothing like that. Yeah, the alphabets are sometimes still a miss but the generic gestures like arrows, lines and shapes are registered every time.
Again, what can you do with it? You can assign an alphabet to open your favorite websites like Guiding Tech. So next time you draw the letter G, you’ll be greeted by us!
But of course, you can do a lot more than that. The Action list goes on for a couple dozen more options and I suggest you explore them on your own. Drawing gestures include all the generic and specific actions I talked about in the multi-touch sections above. There’s also support for sharing a page, saving a screenshot, adding a page to bookmarks and basically every action you can do by tapping a button or fiddling with menus can be done by drawing on the screen.
You can assign gestures from the Settings menu but there is a more convenient option located in the Toolbar. Tap the hand icon, draw a gesture and assign an action.
Modules are snippets of code that let you interact with a different service or an app directly from iCab. So, by assigning a multi-touch gesture, you can potentially send a page to Pocket, your Safari Reading List or Evernote, share the page on Facebook or twitter or even convert the page into a PDF or ePub book. All of this is done by using web services integrated inside the app.
Check out all the modules by going into Settings -> Services -> Modules.
If you are even a little bit serious about working on the iPad, you have a keyboard dock. iPad, with its distraction free setup is a great tool for writers. But writing and browsing goes hand-in-hand. If you use iCab to do your online research, you can save the trips from the keyboard to the screen by using built-in keyboard macros or assigning new ones yourself.
This is one of the biggest features introduced in iCab 8.0, thanks to iOS 7’s background refresh. iCab can now always stay in background, so if you are downloading a big file (yes, unlike Safari, iCab lets you download files), you can go ahead and put the iPad to sleep or switch to any other app without worrying about killing the download.
Furniture design software mac. iPads are now home computers, we share them with our family members. But there are always things like email that you might want to keep private.
Now, thanks to iCab your entire family can use one browser to get online without invading each other’s privacy.
Is Firefox your desktop browser? Would you like to have all your bookmarks and history available directly in iCab? Do you use LastPass to save passwords for websites?
iCab integrates with both Firefox Sync and LastPass to bring you desktop like browsing experience on your iPad.
There’s a lot more to iCab than the features listed here. As always, the best way to learn about a new app is to do some exploring yourself.
Top image credit: Michael Coghlan
You can use the Chrome search bar as a calculator.
iCab 3.01 respects the current web standards (HTML, CSS), nevertheless some web pages looks different in iCab than in other browsers2 - sometimes even in a way the page will become unusable. What is the reason for this?
Web standards, especially HTML, don't define all aspects of the layout (this is not always possible and in most cases this doesn't make any sense), so there many different but nevertheless correct ways to display certain HTML elements for example. But many web authors rely on a certain layout of a certain browser (the browser they are using themselves). And when the page is then only tested with this one Browser, any layout issues and errors which would be visible in other browsers remain undetected.
Also all browser have bugs, which can lead to layout which is different to the standards-conforming layout and which is really wrong. But many web authors even rely on such wrong layout, so in the end the're relying on bugs of certain (popular) browsers. Browsers without these bugs may then have difficulties to display the page.
Therefore iCab can be configured so that it strictly respects the web standards or to simulate the bugs and wrong behaviour of other popuplar browsers. The following sections describe what can be modified in iCab and where these settings can be found to get the best compatibility with other Browers and most web pages (in case this is possible at all).
Please note that you should reload the web page after changing the preferences when you want to see the effect of the new setting. Sometimes you may need to try out different alternatives until you get a suitable result. This is true especially for the Identity setting).
In addition to the description about the best compatibility settings you'ff also find some hints about the most reasonable setting which is more secure for example, but which may have some issues on some badly designed web pages.
Make sure that 'Quartz Text Rendering' ist enabled, otherwise the text may look a little but 'fuzzy'.
(Mac OS X only)
Fantastical 2 5 15 full. Please choose the fonts which are shown in the screenshot, the easiest way to to this is to click the button 'Factory Settings'. The default font sizeshould be 16 and for the minimum font size 9.
Usually a font size of 14 and a minimum font size of 10 is much better to read, but these are different values than in most other browsers.
To show all content of web pages, all of these options in this panel should be enabled, with the exception of the 'Accesskey' setting. Becaue no other browser will show 'Accesskey' information, most web designer don't assume that a browser would be able to display this information and so there can be layout issues with the 'Accesskey' option checked.
If you always want to see all navigation options within a web site, you should enable the 'Accesskey' option and let iCab underline all links.
To configure iCab to be as much compatible as possible to other browsers (in not respecting the web standards), all of these options should be unchecked.
Many web pages require JavaScript, therefore you should enable if. Please activate all JavaScript versions with theexception of 'JScript'.
Many web pages which do heavily depend on JavaScript may require that all of these Options are enabled. Otherwise navigating within the web site may fail.
Usually you can at least disable the option 'open windows automatically', which prevents that all the annoying popup advertising windows will open.
In some cases it can be necessary to disable the MSIE-DOM (a JavaScript extension from Microsofts, especially document.all), because somebadly programmed 'Browser Sniffer' will fail. But on some other badly programmed web pages, the MSIE-DOM could be even needed.
Usually the MSIE-DOM setting can be switched off, because iCabsupports the W3C compliant way for DHTML.
To make sure that all images and background images are displayed, youmust not filter them out. Even images from foreign servers shouldn't be filtered out. The same is true for embedded frames (IFrames), which can also contain images, but also much more.
It's often more secure to filter out IFrames from foreign servers. This prevents 'spoofing attacks' where parts of the web sites is coming from a server which is not shown in the address bar of the browser.
Many web sites use 'Cascading Style Sheets' (CSS) to define the layout of the site. If the parts of the web page are displayed in a very chaotic way oron top of each other instead of side by side, you've probably switched off CSS.As screen resolution you should use 96 dpi, regardless of the real screen resolution.
Smart shooter 3 3 32.
With the help of plug-ins (QuickTime, Shockwave Flash, Real Player, Windows Media, etc) a browser is able to display several other file formats. Manyweb pages will require such plugins, so in general Plugins should be enabledin iCab.
In case iCab crashes when a certain plugin is used, you may check foran update of the plug-ins (or just disable the plug-in). Here're the links to the most important browser plug-ins: Real, Shockwave, Flash.
Some web pages will work correctly only if the 'Referrer' (the address ofthe web page you're coming from) is always sent to the server with each request.So set the 'Referrer' option to 'always', which is the default setting for almost all other browsers.
Important: The setting 'always' can be a big security issue. This is why iCab uses the setting 'only within the same domain' by default, which is a good compromise. Web pages which require the setting 'always' should be avoided.
It is often required to accept 'Cookies', otherwise many web shops wont work and on many web pages ypu can not log-in without accepting the cookies. Switch off all of the options to accept all cookies and select 'always accept' in thepopup button.
If a web page still reports that the browser would not support cookies, theproblem is caused my a badly programmed server script which is confusedby the browser identity and then fails to send or recognize the requiredcookies. In this case you can usually work around the problem by selectinganother browser identity (like the one of FireFox or Internet Explorer) in iCab.Because a problem like this is caused by bugs on the server side, you shouldsend a bugreport to the administrators of the web site so they can fix the problem.
You can configure iCab to accept all cookies for the current session only. This way all the cookies will be automatically deleted when quitting iCab. The advantage for this is that its much mor difficult toidentify your browser and to collect information about the sites you're visiting. The disadvantage is that you have to login manually in web pages whichotherwise would offer an automatic login mechanism when cookies are permanently stored.
Many web servers deliver different HTML code to different browsers. Sometimes to work around some issues of a certain browser, but sometimes only because the author of the web page doesn't have enough knowledge about the web and its standards. This can cause problems if iCab gets some bad code only because the server isn't able to recognize iCab as 'supported' browser. This is why you can configure the identity with which iCab will identify itself to the server or JavaScript code. So in case a web page doesn't work correctly, changing thenetwork identity to 'FireFox', 'Opera' or 'Internet Explorer' may fix the problem.
Some 'Browser Sniffers' will also look for the JavaScript identity, soyou may also need to change the JavaScript identity setting. Check if the Netscape or the Internet Explorer setting will solve the problem. You canalso configure the version number, because some web pages will use at the browser version number to decide if a certain feature is used or not.In general you shouldn'd use version numbers lower than 5.0, for Netscapeyou can go up to 7.0 for Internet Explorer up to 6.0 (when newer versionsof Netscape or Internet Explorer will be released, you can probably alsocheck out larger version numbers)
Using the 'Default identity' menu item of the 'View' menu,you can change the identity setting much easier. Gemini 1 5 6 – locate and eliminate duplicate files. This menu item willchange the JavaScript and the Network identity and a few other settings at the same time to mimic the selected browser.
Web pages should be written in a ways so that the browser gets the information about the text encoding that is used by the page. If thisinformation is missing, a browser has to assume some default encoding,which can be the wrong encoding and then some special characters may bedisplayed wrong. iCab will use the encoding that is configured inthe 'Text Encoding' menu when the encoding of the web page is unknown.So when a web page is displayed with some wrong characters, you may be able to fix this by selecting the correct encoding manually in this menu.In most cases the encoding 'Western Europe/USA (ISO-8859-1)' should be correct. But also 'UTF-8' is often used.
Many web pages require that JavaScript is enabled. If a navgation menu or a form doesn't work it's probably because JavaScript is switched off.
Note: If the navigation menu doesn't work, even if JavaScript is enabled,the problem can be also related to the 'Identity' setting. Some web pagesrefuse to work if the browser is not recognized as 'FireFox' or 'Internet Explorer'. So selecting a different identity in iCab may solve these problemsas well.
If you're using the Filter Manager, you are able to configure specific browser settings for certain sites (without affecting other sites, which will still use the normal settings). This is a very powerfultool and can be used for many usefuly tasks (like filtering advertising banners etc). But sometimes it can be usefuly to switch off the filter manager completely to test how certain settings affect the layout of the current page(like finding the best identity setting for a web page). So using the menu item'Filter manager Active' you can temporarily switch off the filter manager.Don't forget to enable it again afterwards.
It's always possible that a web page will be displayed in a bad way because of a bug in iCab. If you've checked out all the items from above and you can't solve the problem, please send a bug report to the iCab-Support. Please include the folloing information in your bug report:
Thank you very much!
1) This description was tested with iCab 3.0 Beta 237, but will ba also valid for newer releases.
2) We use the browsers Safari and Firefox for a comparison of the 'correct' layout.
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